... And I don’t want to take this opportunity to talk a lot about me, I want to take an opportunity to serve you. We had an eight year conflict that really went public the last year, but it’s been eight years, and some of you struck shepherds know what that’s like. By the time everybody else knows, you’ve already been dealing with it for a long time.

Joyful Exiles, a site dedicated to discussing the firings and trials of Paul Petry and Bent Meyer, went public March 2012. For Driscoll to have presented that conflict as if it had been ongoing or unresolved and only becoming a public matter in 2014 is a fundamentally inaccurate depiction of the situation even if we were to only look at stuff on the internet from things documented as having been written by Mark Driscoll himself. Driscoll's 2007 account was available since 2012.

But there's no evidence that after the firing of Meyer and Petry that Driscoll considered the matter ongoing. "There's a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus", for those who heard that audio clip, did not sound like the chuckling of a man who considered the issue to be anything other than resolved in the fall of 2007.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2015/06/DriscollHillsong.mp439.45I never got to say good-bye to the church and the people and so what went public was actually the resignation letter that went to the legal governing board that was in authority over me and so, uh, i uh, I know under the circumstances there wasn't a way to do that that would have been, uh, clean or easy. I don't have any criticism of the board. I think that, for the people, that there wasn't closure and I didn't, we didn't get to say anything. And we didn't expect to resign. I met with the board. There was a whole list of things that were charged by current and former leaders and there was an internal governance struggle and threats of legal action that it got very complicated. And a lot of it was anonymous through the internet so you don't know who is saying or doing what. And so I invited the board to do a full examination, interview anybody, anything, and we woud submit to whatever verdict that they determined. ... When I think about eight weeks we met Friday and Saturday, October 10 and 11. I remember because the 11th was my birthday and so Grace and I were present with the board and they said: "We see in your history of leadership, less in more recent years but particularly in the past, pride, anger and a domineering leadership style." That would be the exact words they used. "We don't see anything disqualifying. These are areas we want you to grow. We want you to leadership at the church soon." They wanted to do some clean up internally. "We want you back on January 4 in the pulpit, give you time to heal, things to cool down, and for some changes to be made."
Notice that the three things don't have to be the same. That set of charges made by former and then-current leaders in 2014 didn't have to be the same as the internal governance struggle OR the threats of legal action. These were distinct. They also weren't complicated for anyone who was in Seattle and able to read about them.

There's been no clear evidence the BoAA ever took Dave Kraft's formal charges very seriously.
The threat of legal action was a headline unto itself. Those two topics are boring.

The interesting topic is the reference to an internal governance struggle. Why? Because it seems that Mark Driscoll didn't mention that in 2015 discussions of the last year of Mars Hill until someone else had already publicly mentioned there was an internal governance struggle.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/driscoll-to-houston-there-was-internal.htmlhttp://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 24, 2015 ...When the criticism of Mars Hill Global began in the Spring of 2014, I wanted to communicate about what happened with Global, its history, the financials, and my mistakes. Unfortunately, I was not permitted to discuss these things just as I was not permitted to discuss the ResultSource situation in the detail that I felt it deserved. There was actually a division on the Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) as some men wanted to put all the blame for both Global and ResultSource on me, but I am thankful for men who did not allow that. [emphasis added]Eight difficult, grievous months have passed since I resigned; four sad, yet hopeful months have passed since Mars Hill held its last service. I began to work on each of these topics through blog posts several months ago with the wisdom, counsel, prayer, and blessing of many friends who are former elders and staff members at Mars Hill.
***
It seems as though Mark Driscoll's account of the last year or two at Mars Hill didn't mention internal governance struggles in narratives before Turner's mention of the same. Unless people have access to fixed statements made by Mark Driscoll between January 2015 and the date of the Brian Houston interview to share ... .

So by Sutton Turner's account the split in the governing board at Mars Hill was over the topic of whether or not to scapegoat him over Result Source and problems to do with Mars Hill Global. Say ... Larry Osborne was on the Mars Hill BoAA around that time that RSI was a controversy. Would Osborne be willing to address this topic for the record? If Osborne was one of the men who would not allow Turner to be scape-goated it might be a great thing to speak up on the matter.

So if people have heard that there was some kind of internal thing going on which internal thing is being indicated could be important. It can't be an investigation into Mark Driscoll's fitness for ministry, can it?

The investigation of formal charges against Mark Driscoll has revealed patterns of persistent sin in the three areas disclosed in the previous letter by the Board of Overseers. In I Tim 5:20, it requires that an elder be rebuked for persistent sin. Our intention was to do this while providing a plan for his eventual restoration to leadership. The Board of Elders in agreement with the Board of Overseers are grieved, deeply grieved, that any process like that was lost to us when Mark Driscoll resigned in position and left the church. [emphasis added] Now is the time to move on and consider what God is calling us to next as a church as we participate in Jesus’ mission to make disciples in His name. Today begins a new chapter in the history of our church which has proceeded in one direction under one leadership for many years now, but I want you to understand this, God is our Father. That does not change. Jesus is the chief shepherd of the church and that has not changed.
Unless, of course, the BoAA members (including Osborne) were disappointed Mark Driscoll decided to quit rather than comply.

In Driscoll's interview with Brian Houston he even stated that he agreed to comply:http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2015/06/DriscollHillsong.mp4
...There was a whole list of things that were charged by current and former leaders and there was an internal governance struggle and threats of legal action that it got very complicated. And a lot of it was anonymous through the internet so you don't know who is saying or doing what. And so I invited the board to do a full examination, interview anybody, anything, and we woud submit to whatever verdict that they determined.[emphasis added]... When I think about eight weeks we met Friday and Saturday, October 10 and 11. I remember because the 11th was my birthday and so Grace and I were present with the board and they said: "We see in your history of leadership, less in more recent years but particularly in the past, pride, anger and a domineering leadership style." That would be the exact words they used. "We don't see anything disqualifying. These are areas we want you to grow. We want you to leadership at the church soon." They wanted to do some clean up internally. "We want you back on January 4 in the pulpit, give you time to heal, things to cool down, and for some changes to be made."We agreed to that. I sent in a go-forward plan and then we went home[emphasis added] to have birthday cake with the kids. I think it was on Monday night. I was in the bedroom. Grace was in the living room. And so we told the board and told the kids, you know, we come back and ["will do"? garbled] preaching and try and love and serve and, and fix what was a struggling church and God had provided a way for us to do that as volunteers. And so our plan was to come back as volunteers.

Except, of course, that's not what happened. Days after agreeing to the restoration plan, Mark Driscoll quit.

So whatever the internal conflict within the governance of Mars Hill was, it seems that it couldn't have been about investigations into Mark Driscoll. By Mark Driscoll's own account the Board thought he could be restored to ministry if he took a break and some things were cleaned up in house. It was Driscoll's account that he got a date, which seems to have been January 4, 2015 by which time he could have been back preaching at Mars Hill. Driscoll's account to Brian Houston was that the investigation was HIS idea. So Mark Driscoll's own testimony makes it impossible to accept without external confirmation that any internal conflict in the governance of Mars Hill at the upper levels necessarily involved him.

However, since Sutton Turner indicated there was a split in the Board over whether to scapegoat him over Result Source and Mars Hill Global THAT could fit the "internal" stuff Driscoll only started mentioning in tales of his last days at Mars Hill on the road or for cameras in 2015.

So if some Jimmy wants to say there were internal things going on and Driscoll felt a need to resign those internal things were apparently not about whether or not the Board felt Driscoll was permanently disqualified from ministry. This isn't simply some matter of speculation, it's a best inference from direct statements made by Mark Driscoll himself. Now, sure, that there are at least six narratives of how and why Mark Driscoll resigned might lead people to wonder how reliable Driscoll's accounts are but that's a separate matter for the purpose of discussion here.

Trinity Fellowship Church Lead Pastor Jimmy Witcher said Driscoll and Evans met at a Gateway Church conference shortly after Driscoll resigned from Mars Hill. The pair soon after formed a spiritual bond.Evans said Driscoll’s past did not deter him from serving on the board of the new church.“When I first met Mark, he was very broken and honest about his shortcomings in his previous church,” Evans said. “I ministered to him a lot about those issues, as did some of my friends. We all see a great heart and tremendous potential in him.”Also serving on the new church’s board is Gateway Church Senior Pastor Robert Morris, and Randal Taylor, vice president of television at Dunham+Company.Taylor, Evans, Morris and Larry Osborne, a senior pastor at North Coast Church in California and a one-time board of advisers member to Mars Hill, are listed in the role of “wise counsel” to The Trinity Church.“As far as offering wise counsel, it is just a role of being there to help Mark process issues as they come up,” Evans said.“Related to being on the governing board, we help Mark make the larger decisions related to the direction, finances, governance and legal issues of the church.”Evans stressed his new responsibilities in Driscoll’s church will not interfere with his duties in Amarillo.

Taylor was tough to pin down because of the common name factor. His LinkedIn profile has subsequently vanished but thanks to journalists being journalists, which Taylor has been confirmed.

It's worth repeating that Larry Osborne was not only on the Mars Hill BoAA during 2014 he was also one of the men who played an advisory role to Mark Driscoll in the 2006-2007 period during which there were those by-laws revisions and the termination and trials of Meyer and Petry. If Osborne's willing to let his name be publicly attached to Driscoll as "wise counsel" can he field a few questions from members of the press about his now close to decade-long association with Driscoll in media terms? Osborne was wise counsel to Driscoll a decade ago and Driscoll turned around and by 2008 was figuratively and literally regarding dissent against executive eldership as demonic.

Wenatchee The Hatchet was part of a ministry in 2008 that was required to listen to the whole thing so as to be able to field questions about it if those came up. There were a lot of nails in the coffin for membership at Mars Hill and that multi-hour marathon in which Driscoll talked about spiritual warfare was one of them.

After much prayer and wise pastoral and professional counsel, the Driscolls believed and agreed that a move to Phoenix was the Lord’s will. Pastor Mark and Grace have had a growing burden for Phoenix and, even though ministry options emerged from other cities, their interest in Phoenix was greatest.Prior to moving, the Driscolls spent months scouting the valley and meeting with dozens of local pastors who were warm and welcoming.Since moving to Phoenix, Pastor Mark and Grace have deepened their love of the city, grown their vision to serve its people, and are glad to call Phoenix home.

...

Nothing about God telling Driscoll he was released from ministry at Mars Hill? That was the story on the road throughout 2015, after all. If you want to review the six different accounts of how and why Mark Driscoll resigned from Mars Hill we've got them compiled here at Wenatchee The Hatchet:

The most frequently asked question that seems to come up that isn't being addressed at all at the FAQ is how Mark Driscoll has managed to turn his back so blithely in the new web presence on the thing he spent his 18 earlier years in ministry telling everybody who would listen, but especially young guys, to live your life toward, legacy. For a guy whose ministry could be summed up as focusing on getting guys to live in terms of legacy Mark Driscoll sure doesn't seem to be in any hurry to mention the legacy of his 18 years in ministry at Mars Hill these days. Way to lead by example there.

He's got that first part but why not quote the second half about the wise turning away anger? Is that implied automatically? Does Driscoll hope that in wisdom he can turn away anger? Can it be turned away without admitting something, at least, about the previous 18 years of ministry he had at Mars Hill?

It's the nature of twitter to try to traffic in wit but in order to traffic in wit you need a track record of reliable observation; and the limit of witticism is that it frequently goes just for the punchline rather than serious observation.

Proverbs warns that not everyone who invokes a proverb isn't a fool. Consider a few chestnuts from Proverbs 26 (ESV)

7. Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless, is a proverb in the mouth of fools.9. Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard is a proverb in the mouth of fools.
When the fool uses a proverb it is at best useless or at worst causes harm when used. One of the ways this can happen is to mistakenly suppose that proverbs, observations about life compiled by sages, can be interpreted as actual promises of any sort from God. Another way an axiom can be abused is by wresting it from its larger literary context and treating it as if it were a generalized observation. Driscoll shared the following back in 2015 ...

Of course we've looked at the problem with such an atomized application before. For those guys who would insist that the wife is a gift from God and a sign of God's favor, Proverbs can't be read separated from the rest of the Bible where Hosea was told to marry a prostitute; where Job's wife advised him to die; where Lot's wife became a pillar of salt; and where Ezekiel was ordered to not mourn publicly the death of his beloved wife. We discussed a bit of that over here. In cultural settings in which you didn't necessarily get to choose if you were married proverbs could have different encouraging roles. If you were arranged into a marriage to someone you weren't in love with but with whom you were to inherit a family estate the wisdom could be in making the best of a situation not entirely in your control and developing mutual good will.

For a guy like Mark Driscoll, it seems, a passage from Ecclesiastes might as well be about the rationale for a white guy in America having a trophy wife.

The pattern so far, however, can look like pulling just the half of the verse that seems emotionally resonant to a dude. Just paraphrase half of one verse from Micah 7 misses out a few parts.

How about verse 9?

I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my causeand executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication.
It'd be easy to focus on the latter two thirds, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me; he will bring me out to the light and I shall look upon his vindication. That part could be appealing. What about "I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him"? Did Mark Driscoll wait and bear the indignation of the Lord because of his sin? Or did Driscoll decide to take matters into his own hands and resign? Let's consider that we can take at face value the assertion that God said "a trap has been set" but why did Driscoll ignore so many passages in scripture in which the Psalmists asked God to deliver him from traps rather than talk about how he needed to deliver himself? What about the detail that in many cases when God warned that a trap had been set it was a trap that could not be escaped? Ironically even when warning Ahab a trap had been set Ahab's disobedience to God meant he marched into the trap anyway and met his end.

Over the years at Mars Hill Mark Driscoll would occasionally prepare to launch into a joke but include a proviso, "My wife told me I shouldn't tell this joke but I'm gonna tell it anyway." Mark Driscoll spent more than just a few minutes here and there playing the role of a mocker who stirred up the city of Seattle. Back in those days he'd say we all need to stop taking ourselves so seriously. For whatever reasons Mark Driscoll seems to be aiming for the earnest, sincere and serious thing this time around.

Well, there's only a future in that one verse in connection to instructions from preceding verses. These include:

13 Do not withhold discipline from a child;if you strike him with a rod, he will not die.14 If you strike him with the rod,you will save his soul from Sheol.

15 My son, if your heart is wise,my heart too will be glad.16 My inmost being will exultwhen your lips speak what is right.17 Let not your heart envy sinners,but continue in the fear of the Lord all the day.18 Surely there is a future,and your hope will not be cut off.

Would Driscoll consent to being the child who gets struck with a rod? Unpleasant as it's described as being that rod is described as saving a child's soul from the grave. Driscoll might insist that Sheol is better interpreted as Hell. Okay, then. If so, then Driscoll gets to be the one who can consider whether avoiding the rod of discipline because he's claiming a trap has been set could have been done in a way that imperils his soul (for those who believe he has one, at least).

Then there's the 15-18 segment. You have a future and your hope will not be cut off if you have gained wisdom and your lips speak what is right and your heart does not envy sinners and continues in the fear of the Lord.

How well does someone who went along with Mars Hill contracting with Result Source to rig a place on the New York Times bestseller list for Real Marriage fit that?

None of this is to say it's impossible for even a Mark Driscoll to have some shot at restoration to a ministry of some kind. I wrote a few times that if he'd chosen to be a regular rank and file tithing member of a church, one he didn't start, and submitted to just being a normal guy for half a decade before being reinstated to a ministry capacity that would be a good thing.

He didn't do that. He not only bailed on participating in a restoration plan he said was proposed by the board at Mars Hill, he retroactively claimed it was at the behest of God. If so that would have been information to have lead with in his resignation letter, not something to share repeatedly on the conference circuit in 2015. That's easy for people with no intimate sense of the history of Mark Driscoll's leadership style to accept at face value in a charismatic scene. But for anyone who heard Mark say in 2014 that you can't just take at face value any claim from some guy who says "God told me" it looks like Driscoll's new career depends on ignoring just about everything he spent 18 years at Mars Hill advising people to do.

Can Driscoll say that having the NYT rigged for Real Marriage didn't even possibly reflect a heart envying the success of sinners? Or is rigging a best seller list not a sin? Would there be a defense to be made for that? The BoAA tried making a defense that the Result Source plan was not technically illegal.

But if Driscoll wants to keep going with one-liner Bible tweets, how about this golden oldie from the NAS reading of Proverbs 13:11Wealth obtained by fraud dwindles, But the one who gathers by labor increases it.

Or the NIVDishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.
If Driscoll wants to do theology by way of twitter Proverbs 13:11 seems like a great verse. He won't even have to cut out half the verse.

Perry, I appreciate your heart in all of this, but do wish you had done your homework and exercised due diligence by finding out what really happened at MHC! I'm afraid you are in the dark about the truth of what transpired and why The Acts 29 network, Paul Tripp and 30 former elders believe that Mark Driscoll disqualified himself and needs to make some things right before stepping back into pastoral ministry! I appreciate your ministry, read your books and value your leadership wisdom.

(WT has a post over here, too If the history of things connected to Driscoll getting taken down persists it can be good to have redundant preservation of statements.)

With the inevitability of "Luke, I am your father." for soeone watching Episode V in 2016 ... Hart goes straight to Mencken.

Perhaps the way the game can proceed is to never define what "great" is. There are, of course, some who deny there is any such thing as greatness while still being willing to say X's work saved my life. But there's "almost" no point trying to interact with people who get that way except to hope that we can recognize that superlatives and love are nearly as inseparable as eating food and defecating. There are settings in which these can be cast in twain but those settings tend to be rare and perhaps a bit unpleasant or unhealthy. :)

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Leithart's recent contributions on the reasons Protestants can't write over at First Things was impressive but mainly in the worst sort of way. Instead of writing a more direct "Why I like Flannery O'Connor" series, what we got was why Protestants can't write. As though John Donne's poetry and sermons weren't touchstones in English language literature? Steven Wedgeworth has written about the peculiarties of Leithart's assertions before but he's managed to sum things up eloquently recently.

https://calvinistinternational.com/2016/02/04/symbolism-modern-peter-leithart-flannery-oconnor/
...Dr. Leithart’s essays on “Protestantism” 1 fall into this tradition of high-church nostalgia and historiographical storytelling. As such they are engaging and imaginative, but they suffer from the same weaknesses as the other storytellers. In the case of the “Protestants Who Can’t Write” dilemma, the majority of the difficult work of argument is actually done by the preliminary assumptions and assertions, as Dr. Leithart seems to admit in his follow-up qualification.

But even admitting this, there are some very basic problems which permeate the entire essay. The definition of great writing is never demonstrated, and one gets the impression that the “sacramental poetics” being valorized really only represents a narrow slice of what others would consider great literature. Various examples of great Protestant writers are also discounted as either outliers or holdovers from an earlier “culture,” giving the reader the impression that the playing field can be tilted in any number of possible directions in order to influence a certain conclusion. Zwingli, for his part, is not treated fairly. He serves instead as a sort of placeholder for “all of the bad things.” Perhaps most serious of all, the expression “sacramental” is used in a very particular way, not necessarily having much or anything to do with the actual sacramental debates of the 16th century. As such, the various characters in Dr. Leithart’s story are really only symbols of ideas, and they have little connection to the historical realities whose names they bear. ...

The most remarkable part is pointing out that post-Trent Catholicism on the Eucharist posited that you had to affirm it was the blood and body only and not "also" wine and bread makes Leithart's proposal that "Marburg" is to blame for Protestants not wanting something to be both real and a symbol; if that's the problem then post-Trent Catholics have the same problem Leithart insists Protestants have had. ...In some ways, this response to Dr. Leithart has been playing his same game. You see, it isn’t merely a discussion of Dr. Leithart or his specific arguments, but it is also an attempt to reorder the larger conservative search for history, identity, and meaning. The nostalgic search for a high-church aesthetic always ends in fiction—not the fiction of great literary prowess, but instead stories about history that are not true. In Dr. Leithart’s story, “Protestantism” does not mean the Protestant Reformation, “Zwingli” does not mean the Reformer of Zurich, and “Sacramental” does not mean a sign and seal of the covenant of Grace. Instead these words are symbols and bare ones at that, not connected to reality. And this is true for all of the “Road Not Taken” stories.

....The Church has no widely accepted theology of history to speak of, just a stream of papal encyclicals that reflect the shifting moods of this or that pontiff. Thinking modern history has largely been left to lay Catholic intellectuals, who have had to sail upwind alone in their little boats.

Well, for the pessimillenialists ...

The golden age of lay Catholic historiography was the nineteenth century, when Counter-Revolutionary thinkers such as Bonald, the young Lamennais, de Maistre, and Donoso Cortés refined the World We Have Lost narrative that has nourished reactionary political movements ever since. But in the twentieth century lay and clerical writers developed a kinder, gentler variation of it that has not lost its appeal among Catholics. Let’s call it The Road Not Taken.Those who recount this kind of story tell us that at some point in medieval or early modern history the West took a momentous wrong turn, putting itself on the path to our modernity with all its attendant problems. ...

Ostensibly presented as a temptation for Catholic historians ... this narrative arc could "also" be construed as the basis for Francis Schaeffer's trilogy, except it's possible to propose that in Schaeffer's case what would have been a Catholic polemic of the road not taken could be reinterpreted as a legend of WASP decline, maybe?

Well, let's get back to Wedgeworth here, who concludes with:...Nothing that has been written above should be taken as a denial of the fact that there is a real crisis in the modern world of arts, letters, and religion. There is. But this crisis is not the legacy of the Protestant Reformation’s ideals being faithfully carried out. Instead, it is the legacy of, among a myriad of decisions and events, the abandonment of those ideals. Especially, we have departed from the robust Christian humanism of Luther, Calvin, and even, yes, Zwingli. Mid-century Protestants hardly recognize the names of their fathers in the faith or the key doctrines to which they are supposed to be adhering. Before we decide which branches of the family tree to cut off, we should first make sure that we have actually identified them all.

Thankfully, in our day, the future is not entirely dim. Modernity has not proved wholly bad at all, but instead has given us new tools by which we can solve toward truth, in less time than any generation before us. We can discover if “Zwingli” is really Zwingli, and we can begin answering those very complicated questions of reception, modification, and revolution, and we can do so with the concrete data rather than just master narratives. The conservative Christian mind has many gifts and talents, but it has to get over its nostalgia and penchant for “Road Not Taken” stories. There is a better way to have this conversation, and encouraging that better way is the first step in beginning to solve our most serious problems.

I've been mulling over Schaeffer's trilogy lately, it's fiftieth anniversary is coming up, after all. Having admired it when I was in my teens (long ago, in other words) I've come to view its overall narrative with some skepticism. Schaeffer managed to recount a fragmentation and a decline. But as a musician with a sometime interest in music history there's more that could have been said about the Renaissance and the Reformation or how the Baroque era developed. There was the old style and the new style and in the 1600s you could learn either style but might well have to know both. The German, Italian, English, and French styles and forms were not thought of as being all that congruent and yet by the high Baroque era some Bach family had members able to synthesize a variety of ostensibly contrasting styles. But that's getting into something that might be best saved for later.

For some reason it just feels like it's worth mentioning that Manfred Bukofzer wrote a history of Baroque music (1947) in which he mentioned that the Pietists were opposed to the cantata while the orthodox Lutherans were okay with it. The paradox here was that the theoretically "new" school was against formal innovations such as assimilating secular musical forms and styles into liturgical music while the "old" school in Lutheranism was okay with it.

Wedgeworth's aside about hip hop practically deserves a separate post because he raises some points that seem worth discussing ... but maybe we'll get to a potentially fun comparison between the condemnation of hip hop as not "real" music to early negative reactions to recitative as being unmusical in 16th and 17th century operatic evolution later.

FORWARD"With the legalization of marijuana in Washington State I wrote a free ebook on the issue theologically and pastorally. I did not address the medical issues because that was beyond my scope of expertise. However, my doctor and friend Dr. John Catanzaro was kind enough to research the medical aspects of marijuana usage and write them up. We genuinely hope this helps Christians make wise decisions and provide wise counsel--especially parents and ministry leaders."Mark DriscollPastor Mars Hill Churchhttp://web.archive.org/web/20130425211223/https://theresurgence.com/authors/john-Catanzaro

Well ... turns out there's robots.txt for Catanzaro's actual articles still, after all.

What's particularly striking is how back in 2010 Driscoll emphatically declared there were six reasons he wasn't going anywhere and wasn't going to leave Mars Hill. Of course a lot happened in the last five years and the following statement has been deleted as of this year.

Then again, in a letter dated from the year 2007, in the wake of the controversial terminations and trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry, Mark Driscoll indicated that he was stressed and in poor health.

In fact it was about a decade ago, according to a letter Mark Driscoll wrote to Mars Hill members in late 2007:

http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdfA letter from Pastor Mark DriscollNovember 8, 2007For me personally, everything culminated at the end of 2006. Despite rapid growth, the church was not healthy and neither was I.
...I was working far too many hours and neglecting my own physical and spiritual well-being, and then I hit the proverbial wall. For many weeks I simply could not sleep more than two or three hours a night. I had been running off of adrenaline for so many years that my adrenal glands fatigued and the stress of my responsibilities caused me to be stuck “on” physically and unable to rest or sleep. After a few months I had black circles under my eyes, was seeing a fog, and was constantly beyond exhausted.Nonetheless, the demands on me continued to grow as the church grew. We added more campuses, gathered more critics, saw more media attention, planted more churches, purchased more real estate, raised more money, and hired more staff. It was at this time that I seriously pondered leaving Mars Hill Church for the first time ever. I still loved our Jesus, loved our mission, loved our city, and loved our people. However, I sunk into a deep season of despair as I considered spending the rest of my life serving at Mars Hill Church. I simply could not fathom living the rest of my life with the pace of ministry and amount of responsibility that was on me.... The illusion of unity our eldership had maintained over the years was kept in part by my tolerating some men who demanded more power, pay, control, and voice than their performance, character, or giftedness merited. While this was a very short list of men, as elders they had enough power to make life truly painful.At the same time I began receiving other lucrative job offers that would allow me to study, preach, and write without all of the administrative duties and burdens for which I am not sufficiently gifted to be responsible for. For the first time in my life, the thought of leaving Mars Hill sounded very relieving. Since I had given ten years of my life to the church and love the people desperately, it was obvious to me that something was deeply wrong that such offers would even be intriguing. [emphasis added]

So in spite of years of saying otherwise, that he wasn't going anywhere and had no plans to leave, it would appear the history of Mark Driscoll privately thinking of hitting the eject button and taking more financially lucrative work elsewhere had been going on since ... well ... ten years ago.

In his book Propaganda, Jacques Ellul proposed that they most worship peace who prepare for war, ,perhaps a parallel could exist for those men who profess their loyalty while they privately consider abandonment?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/02/01/mark-driscoll-announces-launch-of-the-trinity-church/
Video 2:40
Gib Martin founded Trinity church. Grace Driscoll described the church. Mark Driscoll, for his part, described how Gib Martin's church was where he was allowed to preach his first sermon.
This is interesting. What's interesting is to compare this warm and affable account of the Martin family with the account Grace Driscoll shared in Real Marriage, where there seemed to have been an undercurrent of resentment on Mark Driscoll's part toward the Martin family, at least from the following passage from Real Marriage (earlier edition):

Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life togetherMark and Grace DriscollThomas Nelsoncopyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLCISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0pages 10-11...Making issues even worse, I (Grace) realized I hadn’t really followed the Genesis command to leave my family and cleave to Mark as my new family. I still called my mom daily and complained when Mark and I were fighting; we spent all our holidays, birthdays, and vacations with my side of the family, rather than starting some of our own family traditions. My parents had keys to the house and would stop by at any time unannounced, so we lacked privacy and I didn’t see it as a problem. I called them “my family” which made Mark feel as if he and I weren’t family. I had to learn to pray and work through our conflict differently, plan some of our own traditions and memories, set healthy boundaries of privacy, and refer to Mark as “my family” and others as our “extended family.”
Learning to others "extended family" ... did that, say, apply to Grace Driscoll's parents or sibling? The passage suggests that early in the marriage Mark Driscoll had some significant issues with his wife calling her actual blood relatives "my family" as if that somehow implied that he was just ... the husband?

So by Grace Driscoll's account in Real Marriage from 2012 it seemed that in the early years there were some issues Mark had with how close she was to her family verses how close he felt she was to him or him to her.

It's also worth remembering that by 2006 and 2008 Mark Driscoll's ideas of healthy boundaries of privacy and access to Grace may have evolved a bit.

http://joyfulexiles.com/2012/03/19/my-story-by-jonna-petry/Shortly before Paul was confirmed as a pastor/elder, I was invited to a dinner to celebrate Grace’s (Mark’s wife and my friend) birthday. There were a dozen or so women in attendance and I ended up sitting next to Karen Schaeffer, who was Mark’s administrative assistant - a lovely, older, godly woman whom I greatly respected. Sitting next to us was an elder’s wife who was close in age and who also had quite a bit of previous ministry experience. The three of us enjoyed great conversation – alive, encouraging, as iron sharpens iron. We ended up being the last three to leave the restaurant and as we walked to the car decided we should pray together for some of the things that had been shared. We got in the car and ended our time together praying for many things, including the elders, our families and the church.

The next morning I heard from the elder’s wife, the one Karen and I had so enjoyed - that she had shared our conversation with her husband and he felt that it showed “disloyalty” on Karen’s part, was gossip, and that it needed to be brought to Mark, which he did. Karen was fired. The gist of what she shared that was branded “disloyal” was a heart of thankfulness that my husband, Paul, was being made an elder because Mark needed strong men around him who could handle and stand up to push-back. When I found out what this elder and his wife had done, I called Mark immediately in tears and asked him to forgive me for my part in that conversation. Looking back, I’m not sure that Karen or I really did anything wrong, but I was sure afraid.
For those who don't remember Mark Driscoll's marathon session teaching staff about spiritual warfare from early 2008, it stands as a landmark in the history of what was once Mars Hill as Mark Driscoll's instruction not just on spiritual warfare but also on things like the generally satanic nature of women who have wanted to be friends with pastors' wives. Since you probably will not find this content anywhere else Wenatchee The Hatchet has to quote content transcribed and published here. The odds that the Driscolls will bring this content back seem remote.

I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family." [slight chuckle] No you don't. "Hey, we need to have coffee." No you don't. "Hey, phone number." What? Nope. "Email." Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. "Oh, come on." Nope. "But I thought you were our pastor." I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic. "Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."

Well, she was Satanic, too. Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.
...Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that.

Womens' ministry was like juggling knives? Is Grace Driscoll absolutely sure Mark Driscoll never, ever said anything that could be construed as even possibly misogynistic?

Now perhaps the Driscolls have taken a more open approach in Phoenix that lets Grace have some friends in comparison to what Mark Driscoll was saying in 2008.

But the recent presentation Mark and Grace Driscoll gave about the connection that Gib Martin's family had to Mark Driscoll's earliest attempts at ministry is a bit different. To go by the gritty narrative of Real Marriage from 2012 it seems Grace's account (assuming no ghostwriting happened) was that Mark could almost be understood to have resented the Martin family. Grace got presented as not feeling there was any problem of a lack of privacy and that it was okay for family to make unannounced visits that, by implication, Mark seemed to have some significant problems with.

Tuesday, February 02, 2016

The tenth anniversary of the first post at Wenatchee The Hatchet was a week or so back, a riff on Roger Scruton's writing about music.

Ten years ago when I started the blog I was fairly content here in the Puget Sound area in terms of location. Not maybe happiest about everything across the board but I felt very confident I would be at Mars Hill the rest of my life.

Obviously things changed in a decade. This still isn't really a watchblog as far as I'm concerned. That said, when the blog "has" been a watchblog here's hoping it has been of a high quality. As far as possible I've tried to source and cite primary sources and statements and document things as accurately as possible. When things have been incorrect I try to issue a correction as soon as practical.

You may have noticed over the years how rarely comments are allowed. That''s been on purpose. Yep, I have actively stifled commentary at this blog because the number of people who have wanted to contribute information and historical context have been fewer than those who have already made up their minds one way or another. As long-time readers over this last decade probably already know the crankier comments often came from people against Driscoll or Mars Hill who were not happy about a failure here to take the desired tone.

One of the temptations of a watchblog is to attempt to infer motives on the part of people who say and do things. As an effort toward journalistic standards of some kind, try to avoid that. Should you say that the"media" doesn't do this so why care about that? Well, if you don't care about aspiring to a higher standard than mainstream reporters who butcher the topic of religion you're welcome to stay at that level ... somewhere else.

This isn't intended to be a watchblog but it's unavoidable that the "reality" seems to be the blog has come to be known as a watchblog dealing with the history of Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll and other figures in the history of the recently split up church.

There's still a lot that can and should be said about the rise and fall of Mars Hill and about Driscoll's course as a public figure.

I have seen, from time to time, atheists and agnostics suggest that in the long-run Driscoll's just another right-wing fundy type and that there wasn't anything "that" unusual about what happened at Mars Hill.

Well ... since we're in an election cycle let's propose an idea that will be explored further--Mark got his degree in speech communications and Grace got training in public relations; Mars Hill was a church plant started in the Puget Sound area during a tech phase in the 1990s and had a leadership core that actively sought out young people interested in innovations in the arts, media and tech. Since somebody has to invoke Jacque Ellul at some point, what made Mars Hill unusual was the intensity with which the leadership culture, even possibly from its inception in the mid-1990s featured people trained explicitly in the techniques that Ellul wrote half a century ago were characteristic of propaganda. Now sure, some of you may say, what else does a preacher do but use speech and propaganda? Isnt that a fact of life?

Yeah, but the level of mastery of integrated media and tech to transform the culture of the megachurch into an instrument of propaganda may be the "one" thing that was unique about Mars Hill. Not it being ostensibly Reformed. Not it being hipster. Not it being evangelical. Not it being innovative as such. No, perhaps the thing about the founding couple that is most noteworthy compared to other couples who have stories of being called into ministry is that in the case of Mark and Grace Driscoll the formal credentialing into the career techniques of propaganda is explicit. Ellul, after all, in his book Propaganda, wrote that human relations and public relations were instruments of propaganda.

When Driscoll resigned in 2014 William Vanderbloemen proposed that Driscoll's resignation "changed everything". Nothing, in fact, has particularly changed in terms of how the business gets done, has it? But what "could" change is for Christians and non-Christians alike to take an opportunity to see how branding and propaganda techniques work in a multi-media tech-savvy church culture.

After years of promising over and over that he'd never leave Mars Hill that's exactly what Mark Driscoll did.

One of the things Jacques Ellul wrote in Propaganda was that nations who prepare for themselves for war venerate peace. It may well be that in the case of Mark Driscoll his years of declaring what he wouldn't do turned out to be protesting too much on the eve of his turning around and doing precisely what he said he didn't or wouldn't do.

Let's not anchor too much on the assumption that Driscoll will stay Reformed or even complementarian. The opportunities that open up by rejecting both are too great. If he spurns complementarianism Grace can have more of a ministry role--the thing that Driscoll wrote ten years ago in Confessions he resented about her, spending time on ministry and neglecting him

Confessions of a Reformission RevMark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2CHAPTER FOUR 150-350 PEOPLEpage 101-102...Shortly thereafter, Grace gave birth to our first child, my sweetie-pie Ashley. Up to this point Grace had continuously poured endless hours into the church. She taught a women's Bible study, mentored many young women, oversaw hospitality on Sundays, coordinated meals for new moms recovering from birth, and organized all of the bridal and baby showers. Grace's dad had planted a church before she was born and has remained there for more than forty years. Her heart for ministry and willingness to serve was amazing. But as our church grew, I felt I was losing my wife because we were both putting so many hours into the church that we were not connecting as a couple like we should have. I found myself getting bitter against her because she would spend her time caring for our child and caring for our church but was somewhat negligent of me.I explained to Grace that her primary ministry was to me, our child, and the management of our home and that I needed her to pull back from the church work to focus on what mattered most. She resisted a bit at first, but no one took care of me but her. And the best thing she could do for the church was to make sure that we had a good marriage and godly children as an example for other people in the church to follow. It was the first time that I remember actually admitting my need for help to anyone. It was tough. But I feared that if we did not put our marriage and children above the demands of the church, we would end up with the lukewarm, distant marriage that so many pastors have because they treat their churches as mistresses that they are more passionate about than their brides.

You'd never be able to guess from that what was going to get revealed in 2012's Real Marriage, that up through about 2006 the Driscoll's were kind of miserable in their marriage. Then again, this is a quote from the first print edition of Confessions that was published a decade ago. Things can change in ten years, including print editions.

So, occasionally, maybe this blog will still track stuff like that.

What's been remarkable about the press coverage and the video statements Team Driscoll's been making about the prospective church in a UPS mailbox that's launching later this year is that they don't seem all that eager to talk about Mars Hill. Greater love hath no one than a guy who quit being a pastor at the only church he said he'd ever been a member of so that he could go "heal up" and start another one somewhere else after having spent the previous decade saying over and over he wasn't planning on going anywhere.

Something Ellul mentioned repeatedly in Propaganda seems worth repeating here and not "just" because it's been time for the two party system to make use of the propaganda that's inevitable in a technological society. Ellul stated that while many people have worked with the assumption that propaganda consists of spin and lies this is not the case. Frequently propagandists care a great deal about facts, details and accuracy in informational claims. Ellul proposed that the real deceit was in the narrative used to interpret the information that was presented. The lie was not in the facts themselves but in what the propagandist would say the facts meant.

Our fiscal year, our budget year, runs from July through June, so we just finished our fiscal year, and those who are administratively gifted and allow us to steward the resources that God has given us, have put together a final year-end report, and I’m really excited to share it with you.Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been.In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
Yet raw statistics need context.http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/

Turned out that based on a memo Sutton Turner sent in earlier 2012, it seemed that even if Mark Driscoll would later say FY2012 was the greatest year ever, prior to that announcement it appeared someone in the top brass thought Mars Hill was on the brink of financial disaster.

Then there's correspondence from Dave Bruskas from May 2012, documented by Warren Throckmorton.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/
...From Pastor Mark:These are tough seasons. Personally we love our staff. Pastorally we are concerned for our staff. Practically we grieve for our staff. Professionally we don’t have a choice but to reduce our staff. We simply have to live within our means. If we reduce staff now we can provide lead time for people to find an option while receiving severance. Had we not done this we would have had to reduce staff without severance this summer. We know this is hard but it is better than the alternative. The various leaders making these decisions across four states have prayed and labored over these tough calls. Your Exec Elders have cut first and deepest. Central is reduced 40% and working double time. We are vacating our offices reducing our staff and in contact nearly every hour every day pulling together and seeking Jesus’ wisdom. Your Executive Pastor Sutton is up at 4am everyday praying for our church. Now is a time for everyone to pray and love a lot. Lastly, without being improper we’ve frankly been through tougher times and deeper cuts before. After 15 years i can say this is not the worst storm we’ve weathered. We will get through it together by Gods grace. Trust me on this fact.

That was just a few days after Mark and Grace Driscoll, using the financial instrument Future Hope Revocable Living Trust, purchased a roughly one million dollar home in Woodway.

You might remember it, that house that Russ Bowen visited for a news report, from inside which someone who kinda sounded like Mark Driscoll said "wrong address"? The address about which, apparently, Driscoll was willing to admit that it was, in fact, his home to share a story about one of his kids being afraid of a chopper flying overhead? That one.

Driscoll simply declared FY2012 was the greatest year ever in the history of Mars Hill. There were stats from earlier in the calendar year showing that giving was less than hoped-for. There were even references to a series of layoffs. But when it came time to sum things up, those statistics were glossed over for "greatest year ever". If there was a lie in there in all that it wasn't likely in the statistics but in a remarkably bold declaration of how great the year was regardless of what the actual facts on the ground were. Ellul would propose that that's precisely the way propaganda works. In 2013 Driscoll would regale Mars Hill with the claim "We're not a wealthy church" as if about 24.6 million dollars in net income for 2012 was small potatoes in the non-profit scene.

Now, sure, perhaps could say that spin-masters and politicians and preachers excel in this sort of thing. Maybe it's their bread and butter. But if it is, if what we're looking at is nothing short of propaganda then it behooves us all to study the details. Yeah, yeah, we can consider the dubious master narrative but we also consider the details.

When I started blogging a decade ago I certainly never imagined this blog would end up being thought of as a watchblog. I also didn't imagine that I wouldn't be at Mars Hill.

It would be nice to shift the blog entirely back to things like music and animation and stuff like that. It would appear some guy is determined to keep on keeping on. So, if intermittently, we'll keep tabs on some stuff but this year maybe we'll get to discussing Ellul's ideas about propaganda and see how they may be able to explain everything from media/tech use in the culture of Mars Hill to the relevance of small groups in Ellul's explanation of propagandistic dynamics.

So for those who have slogged through the last ten years, thanks for reading Wenatchee The Hatchet. Here's hoping for a few more years of being able to write about music, theology, the arts, and maybe sometimes the history of the Puget Sound church scene.

Thanks for reading. This certainly has turned out to be what I envisioned for the blog when I started it back in 2006.

Kappas was around in the earliest years. It's hard to know why Kappas could play a useful role in reining in Mark Driscoll's character issues now when he produced no evidence of being able to play such a role in the last twenty years.

Once again this raises an interesting question of why Acts 29 leadership backed off the content in which they said they wanted Driscoll to step away from ministry and get help if a regional director of Acts 29, the Northwest division where you'd think Acts 29 would be most informed of the problems board leadership said Driscoll had, is publicly listed as a prayer supporter.

Miles McPherson – Senior Pastor The Rock Church in San Diego CaliforniaJohnnie Moore Christian author, speaker, humanitarian, former chaplain and Senior Vice President of Liberty UniversityRobert Morris – Founding and Senior Pastor Gateway Church in Dallas Texas
Throckmorton has that topic fairly decently covered for those who aren't already up to speed.Perry Noble – Senior Pastor NewSpring Church in Anderson South Carolina

Osborne had been named publicly as far back as the middle of 2012 as someone who would be part of a team that would assess formal charges against Mark Driscoll.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120531232846/http://marshill.com/governance
...In the event that a formal charge and/or accusation is made against Pastor Mark that, if investigated and found to be true, would disqualify him from his position as an elder in Mars Hill Church, a group of five men consisting of both elders within Mars Hill Church and Christian leaders outside of Mars Hill Church, will investigate the charge or accusation and determine if it is true. This group currently consists of Jamie Munson, Dave Bruskas, James MacDonald, Darrin Patrick, and Larry Osborne. If the charge or accusation is found to be true, this group can rebuke Pastor Mark or, if warranted, remove him as an elder at Mars Hill Church. If Pastor Mark is removed as an elder, he automatically ceases to serve on the Board of Elders, on the Executive Elder Team, and as president of Mars Hill Church.

So it would appear that by Mark Driscoll's account he agreed to a restoration plan, then decided to resign, and now it would appear that one of the members of the Board at the time Driscoll resigned in October 2014, is publicly willing to say that the way Mark Driscoll decided to not comply with the restoration plan was okay?

“The Board of Overseers has accepted that resignation and is moving forward with planning for pastoral transition, recognizing the challenge of such a task in a church that has only known one pastor since its founding,” states the letter, signed by Michael Van Skaik, Larry Osborne, Jon Phelps and Matt Rogers.

Wayne Grudem's name, notably, was reportedly there and then not. But the names that have stuck around through today that can be obviously observed from the history of Mars Hill in the last eighteen years are interesting. If Osborne didn't manage to be part of a governance system that kept Driscoll from going askew in the 2007-2012 era during a couple of significant re-orgs why should anyone be sure Osborne will play a different role now? The same goes for Kappas. These were guys who were in positions, if we're to believe things said about Driscoll's submission to spiritual authority in the last eighteen years, to have advised Driscoll that this or that idea was not so good. And yet Result Source and citation errors and fiscal cliffs happened anyway.

As you've had a chance to read for yourself, some of the people who are praying for the church launch are people who have had their own headlines involving Result Source; their own stories of advising Driscoll in the 2007 through 2012 period of governance; their own explaining to do as to why Acts 29 associates are publicly letting themselves be listed as prayer/support people when Acts 29 board leadership seemed pretty clear Mark Driscoll needed to step aside and get help.

Osborne, he was on the Board of Advisors and Accountability at the time Mark Driscoll resigned. He could have a lot of explaining to do.